My descent into darkness led me to decipher the hidden
funding of Families for Excellent Schools, a New York based organization that
poured over $17 million in dark money into the Great Schools Massachusetts
ballot committee for 2016’s Question 2 on charter schools. That brought me to
the initial funding to get FES up and running in Massachusetts, which came from
a Boston based Internal Revenue Code 501(c)(3) charity called Strategic Grant
Partners. The investments from SGP are consistent with the practice of wealthy
individuals using charitable entities to influence the direction of public
policy, a topic I explored in Unmasking
the Philanthrocapitalists Who Almost Bought Massachusetts Schools. One way
for wealthy individuals to grease the path to their public policy goals is to
fund organizations that undermine teachers unions, a topic I took up in Philanthrocapitalists
Brandish BEANball at BTU.

In the course of this research I have created a database of
all Strategic Grant Partners’ publicly available grants since its inception,
from its Form 990PF tax returns. The non-profit has dispensed many grants for
family support and educational purposes over that time to about seventy
grantees, only five of which I would characterize as engaging in political activities:
advocacy/organizing/mobilizing for three of them, adding lobbying activities
for two, Stand for Children and Families for Excellent Schools. There were no
grants to political activities organizations until Stand for Children in 2009,
and then no other such organization received a grant until 2013 when Education
Reform Now and Families for Excellent Schools received funding.

(One note on reading these tables. For year I use the
year of the Form 990 PF tax return for SGP, which operates on a July 1-June 30
fiscal year. So when you see the year 2015, that period runs from July 1, 2015
through July 1, 2016).

The Stand for Children donations coincided with Stand’s
involvement in a 2012
ballot proposal and the 2013
Boston mayor’s race. Here are SGP’s contributions to Stand for Children,
which ended, along with the mayoral campaign, during 2013:

Let’s look at the other political recipients, starting in
2013:

FES received a total of $1.8 million. (In earlier posts I
misread contribution information concerning amounts committed in one year for
distribution in a future year, leading to a double count of some funds and
somewhat inflating the FES amounts. Rookie mistake. I apologize for the error).
Education Reform Now got $138,400.00 in 2013-2014. It is the dark money funder
of Democrats for Education Reform Massachusetts.

That leaves us with Educators for Excellence and Leadership
for Educational Equity, both of which received $810,000 between July 1, 2014
and June 30, 2016. We met LEE in Philanthrocapitalists
Brandish BEANball at BTU. It serves as a campaign
school/networking/advocacy/organizing arm aiming to put former Teach for
America alums in elected and appointed leadership positions.

Educators for Excellence has also earned the ire of the
Boston Teachers Union, which called out E4E as anti-union here and here. The group
holds itself out as an alternative voice for teachers and is funded nationally
by the Walton Foundation, Arnold Foundation, Gates Foundation, etc. So $810,000
in local money get the group up and running in Massachusetts got the BTU’s
attention.

But wait! There’s more!

The sums in the latest table are contributions committed in
those years but for payment in future years. We don’t have the 2016 tax returns
now and the fiscal year doesn’t end until the end of this month, but we can be
pretty sure that neither E4E nor LEE has been starving this past year.

But wait! There’s even more!

There’s even more because Strategic Grant Partners’ Managing
Director Joanna Jacobson is also President and Trustee of The Jacobson Family
Foundation Family Trust and in each of 2014 and 2015 the JFFFT donated $1
million to Educators for Excellence. That means that the “launch” of E4E in
Massachusetts has benefited from at least $2.8 million from July 1, 2014 up
through June 30, 2017 and probably more, given the future funding commitments. That’s
much more than either Stand for Children or Families for Excellent Schools
received for their campaigns.

Of these five political operations, four are from out of state. The purpose of the grant in three cases was to "launch organization in Massachusetts." The purpose for the Stand for Children grant was "capacity building." Stand was already in Massachusetts, but it is headquartered in Portland, OR. In its early years it was involved in community based organizing but by 2009, with funds from the Gates Foundation and other wealthy interests, it transformed into an effective opponent of teachers unions.

The Stand for Children and Families for Excellent Schools
initiatives both led toward the ballot box and thus we could look at OCFP
reports; but these days the reports only tell us which dark money front is
laundering for which elegantly named shell. That’s the tip of the iceberg. But
there is much more.

The Washington
Post recently adopted a new slogan: “Democracy dies in darkness.” I
agree.

[Full disclosure: as an educator in
the UMass system, I am a union member.I write about dark money (and other things). I don't write about education
policy.]